Arts & Culture | Film

For someone as detail-obsessed, as meticulous as Alan Berliner, this has been a frustrating few weeks. He ushers a guest into his Tribeca loft, apologizing for what seems to him a state of chaos. One side of the immense space is devoted to a nearly floor-to-ceiling collection of boxes, crates, film canisters and what-have-you. The boiler in his building is being replaced and everything he had in storage in the basement is apparently now piled on his floor. As befits a self-confessed perfectionist, Berliner’s stacks of belongings are neater than most people’s ordinary living space. (My office should only look this “messy.”)

It would not surprise me if the daily reviews for “Zaytoun,” Eran Riklis’ new film which opens on Sept. 20, chide the Israeli filmmaker for sentimentalizing the film’s central relationship. The movie traces the slowly growing friendship between Yoni (Stephen Dorff), a downed Israeli flyer, and his erstwhile captor Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee who helps him escape captivity during the first Lebanon War. As the pair move from open enmity to tough love and eventually to mutual respect, it would be easy to overlook the intelligent emotional distance with which Riklis treats them, to mistake the film for an easy celebration of the Rodney King-can’t-we-all-get-along school of ineffectual good will.

Howard Lutnick did not lose his life on Sept. 11, 2001 because he took his son to school. The Cantor Fitzgerald CEO raced to the scene of the terrorist attack and, during the collapse, he struggled to breathe, thinking he might die.

It wasn’t planned that way, but “Afternoon Delight,” the first feature film directed and written by author and television veteran Jill Soloway, is opening at a perfect time in the Jewish year. A mordantly funny and deeply felt film about transgression and forgiveness, it is just the thing for the end of Elul and the coming of the Days of Awe.

“The Act of Killing,” currently playing here, is a mysterious film, a documentary that appears to be equal parts South Asian musical epic, gangster noir and political/historical essay. The movie’s oddly hybrid nature is largely the result of the strange and sinister reality that Joshua Oppenheimer, the director, found when he first went to Indonesia, the film’s location and subject.

The evocative term “baggy-pants comic” has its roots in burlesque, but you could apply it with some justice to the new documentary film “When Comedy Went to School,” which opens on July 31 in New York City and Aug. 2 on Long Island. The film, directed by Mevlut Akkaya and Ron Frank, tells the story of the Catskills hotels as a training ground for stand-up comedians and, like the burlesque funny man’s trousers, it’s rather shapeless. But, like the guy inside the trousers, it is also very funny.